


somewhere, icarus crawls from the sea

by akaiiko



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Angst, Canon Speculation, Hopeful Ending, M/M, Post-Kerberos Mission, Quintessence Sensitive Keith (Voltron), Suicidal Thoughts
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-15
Updated: 2020-03-15
Packaged: 2021-03-01 03:21:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,142
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23148424
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/akaiiko/pseuds/akaiiko
Summary: Out in the desert, Keith finds a reason to survive the loss of Shiro.Psych evals don’t find anything wrong with Keith. The baseline they’re comparing against, the one he came to the Garrison with, is fucked up anyway. So they clear him. Fit for duty.Keith is more than familiar with loss. Grief and he are intimate, in a way he’s never been intimate with another person. No. That’s a lie. A half lie. Enough of a lie that it settles on his skin like desert grit and leaves him feeling dirty in a way he’ll never clean off.Because the truth is: sometimes, it felt like what he had with Shiro was realer and more intimate than his grief.
Relationships: Keith/Shiro (Voltron)
Comments: 9
Kudos: 121





	somewhere, icarus crawls from the sea

Psych evals don’t find anything wrong with Keith. The baseline they’re comparing against, the one he came to the Garrison with, is fucked up anyway. So they clear him. Fit for duty.

Keith is more than familiar with loss. Grief and he are intimate, in a way he’s never been intimate with another person. No. That’s a lie. A half lie. Enough of a lie that it settles on his skin like desert grit and leaves him feeling dirty in a way he’ll never clean off.

Because the truth is: sometimes, it felt like what he had with Shiro was realer and more intimate than his grief. His loss. His _abandonment_.

* * *

“I’m sorry, Keith,” Adam says. “I know how much he meant to you.”

They’ve never been friends, but being older and wiser apparently means being the bigger man. Keith hates that Adam couldn’t be the bigger man when it counted. When it was for Shiro.

“I loved him too,” Adam lies.

* * *

Anyway, people keep apologizing. Officers, flight instructors, cadets. Keith hates that too, because they aren’t sorry for dishonoring Shiro with lies about Pilot Error. They’re sorry that Keith lost Shiro. No. They’re sorry that Keith _loved_ Shiro.

Keith’s not sorry.

Iverson sits him down a month after mission failure. “I know what the psych evals are,” he says, with a grimace that suggests he doesn’t believe a word of them. “But I also know what Shirogane was to you.” People keep saying that. “What Shirogane _is_ to you.” That’s new.

Silence stretches between them, punctuated only by Iverson’s fingers drumming on the desk. It’s a little like an executioner’s beat.

“Why am I here?” Keith asks. Being in this office is the worst kind of reminder. Every other time he’d been called in, Shiro’d been five steps behind and already arguing on Keith’s behalf.

“You’re not moving on.”

“I’m not giving up on him.”

“They’re not the same thing,” Iverson says. “You’re not going to survive this if you keep holding on to a dead man.”

“I know,” Keith says. He thinks of the sunset as they raced through the desert, and the weight of Shiro’s hand, and the choice to make Shiro his anchor in a vast universe.

“I don’t think you do.”

But he does know. Shiro is his anchor, and he would rather drown than let go.

* * *

When he can’t take it anymore—the apologies and the lies and the reminders—he steals a hoverbike. He tears out into the desert and chases the stars winking into existence on the horizon. He thinks of Icarus.

The cautionary moral is don’t fly too high. (Don’t love too hard.)

Out in the desert there’s a cliff. So long ago it feels more like story than memory, he watched Shiro fly off it even as he skidded to a frightened stop. It’d felt like awe, watching Shiro defy gravity, and awe felt like terror which felt an awful lot like love.

Keith doesn’t mean to go there. Not consciously. Just like he doesn’t mean to gun it as he approaches and then hurtles over the edge. But as he cuts the throttle he is—for a heartbeat—weightless.

They say Icarus flew too high. But it wasn’t the flight that killed him.

Closing his eyes, Keith waits for the inevitable moment when gravity kicks in. Its a sudden rush of air, a hook behind his navel, a curious lack of fear. When it comes for him, he welcomes it with a sigh. Because it was never the flight that killed Icarus. It was the fall.

Something cracks open in him. It’s raw and cruel and shining, like watching stars be born out of a dying nebula, and for the first time—

—for the _last_ time—

—he’s not alone.

In him are things he can’t name, and they say the universe is a net of light and he wants to believe.

On his seventeenth birthday, Shiro drives him out into the desert. They watch the Milky Way unspool above them. Kerberos has just been publicly announced. Garrison mandated distance between their bodies disappears as Shiro takes his hand and tugs him closer and: "Wait for me."

"Always," Keith says, and happiness runs through his veins like gold through a mountain. For Shiro he can do anything, even wait. Patience yields focus.

The sky splits open above them.

"Wait for me," Shiro says again. More desperate this time. "I'm coming back for you."

Eyebrows furrowing, Keith looks up into Shiro's face. When did Shiro get a scar? It streaks across the bridge of his nose, white as the ever expanding Milky Way above, and makes him look half wild.

Shiro cups his face with both hands. "You have to be there when I get back."

"I'm going to be," Keith says. Because he is. It's Shiro who's going away. No. Not going. _Gone_. This is a memory. He reaches up and grips Shiro's wrists. "But you won't be there. You're not coming back. You're—"

"No, Keith, you have to promise me. Promise me you'll wait."

"I can't make promises to a dead man."

Shiro bares his teeth and his hands tighten reflexively, almost bruising, like he can keep Keith with him by sheer force of will. "I am not dead," he says. "Now _promise me_. I'm going to come back for you. Don't go where I can't follow."

Inhaling shakily, Keith nods as much as he can in Shiro's tight grip. "I promise," he whispers. "I promise."

"Good." Shiro's eyes darken with tears, then he lunges forward and kisses Keith. Hard, like he wants this to bruise too. "Now open your eyes, baby, and _survive_."

Keith's eyes snap open and he kicks on the engine. The ground is close and he is—for a heartbeat—terrified. An updraft catches the wings and the engine roars like a lion. Like a miracle, he skims the canyon floor hard enough to scrape paint before leveling out.

The hoverbike drifts to a stop twenty yards out. He lets the overworked engine idle as he buries his face in his hands. Whatever cracked open in him is still there—

—will always be there—

—and he barely knew how to contain himself, how is he supposed to contain this?

Sobs wrack his frame as he curls in on himself. Pressing the heels of his palms into his eyes, he tries to think past the overwhelming presence in his bones and the grief that he would have followed into death. Because he nearly did.

Not the flying, but the fall.

It takes time to stop crying. After, his insides feel scoured clean and his eyes are stung swollen. Not okay. But alive.

Tipping his head back, Keith takes in the Milky Way above him. Somewhere out there, across the universe, Shiro's alive. "I'll wait," he promises. "I'll stay."

**Author's Note:**

> this kids is what we call a catharsis fic. i og wrote it as a twitter thread for world suicide prevention day, but it lives here now. if you wanna see more stuff like this (and more cheerful things tbqh) you can follow me on [twitter](https://twitter.com/akaiikowrites).


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